Mark Wignall | Dr Chang is wrong on this

Recently, our Security Minister, Horace Chang, offered a view that if more money had been spent on upgrading the police rather than on social-intervention programmes, crime would have been reduced.

Let me not accuse the minister of falling into a narrow binary viewpoint hardly expected from a man of his calibre. When the zones of special operations were first launched, one key part of the total operations was social intervention in the targeted communities.

So Dr Chang, maybe you should be judged on it simply being a ‘misspeak’. The key quality that makes for a good, effective minister is acceptance of the fact that many of our people feel left out of tangible development in this country. All ministry policy must flow from that basic understanding.

Many of our poor and powerless look on at the Government not necessarily as the provider of leftover bones for starving dogs, but definitely as the generator of programmes that can reach sufficient numbers of those very people at street level.

When more of our people are freed from the daily blight of existing on the edges, that alone will bring them into a better understanding of the need for lawful action in their communities

Many will be freed from seeing the criminal gang leader as security and economic hero. Certainly, if that theory holds, there is hardly anything in that approach that would be negative to building a better police force.

But then again the security minister was probably physically tired, and like the rest of us in Jamaica, mentally under pressure.

GOVERNMENT PRESENTS THE WRONG PICTURE

Mid last week as my lawyer friend and I (and just about all of Jamaica) were trying to deal with the horrors of the Clarendon mother and her four children brutally killed, we agreed on a number of issues.

One: the most fundamental function of a government is to provide for the safety, security, and peace of the people. On that basis, the JLP administration earns a failing grade.

For about two years now I have expressed the view that the various states of emergency are the security ministry and the police force’s crime plan.

The police and the army seem always to be on the backfoot, always outmanoeuvred and left guessing. The resolve of the criminal element in Jamaica has taken on an in-your-face attitude while our security arms are forced to hover in place until a new outbreak and another community erupts.

COMMISSIONER OF POLICE GIVES AWAY THE GAME

Recently, the commissioner of police used the words “we are occupying the space” ostensibly as a main security approach in the state of emergency across the parish of St Catherine.

If the top cop was making reference to the main hotspot that is Spanish Town, I could understand his approach, but St Catherine is a big parish. According to my lawyer friend, “How long can you occupy the space in terms of police and army personnel?”

We both agreed that to occupy the space where mayhem occurs, the country would need a police force about four times the size of the current JCF and an even bigger army. So, Commissioner, knowing that resources will never be in place to do that, what is the leftover option?

This ‘occupying of space’ is an authentic crime-fighting tool, especially in a situation where a sudden eruption of gang war on the streets occurs. But violent criminality in Jamaica has long become the norm, and any other security approach that would follow after most of the space has been occupied would be unaffordable.

What the occupation of space scenario as espoused by the commissioner confirms to us is that the working model coming out of a state of emergency is the Government’s de facto crime plan.

JONES AVENUE I KNEW

I met T in the mid 1960s. He was the oldest of our circle of friends in Pembroke Hall/Arlene Gardens. Excepting for T, all of us were close to our last years in various high schools – KC, Wolmer’s, St George’s and others.

T could barely help himself through basic reading and writing, and he never mentioned school in discussion. As we left high school and either took starter jobs or prepared for further education, T held a job as a messenger for a company in the heart of Kingston.

Time moved on to the early 1980s, and T grew tired of selling fudge from a bike near to where he lived on Jones Avenue, now said to be the home base of men before the courts in the One Don Gang trial.

Then, Jones Avenue was just a dirt lane fit for pedestrians and bike riders.

T lived with an attractive half-Indian lady from Waterhouse. T got a farm work ticket and sent back money to his girl to stock out the shiny, clean floor space of the small wooden structure they rented.

She bought a small freezer, a fridge, a bed, a chest of drawers, a dining table, and four chairs. At night, while T worked hard abroad picking apples in the biting, cold weather on an American farm, his girlfriend had another man sleeping on the bed that T had bought.

Information reached back to him, and as he reached the airport in Kingston, he called me and asked me to meet him at his home at Jones Avenue. He told me that his mission was to chop up his girlfriend. Reaching out to me was his way of asking me to save him from himself.

I watched and talked to him as he used a file on his machete and unashamedly cried. His girl was puzzled at first, but as she figured it all out, he suddenly lunged for her. She awkwardly bolted through the door and ran head first into tall rusted, toppling zinc fencing. In desperation, he flung the ‘lass’ at her as she disappeared from his life.

T went AWOL in 1983, and I’ve not heard from him since although information came to me that he became a fearsome pimp on the streets of a big American city.

Jones Avenue wasn’t famous then. It has attained infamy status in recent months.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.